New home, condo sales rebound from 2013 slump

Last month was best-ever March for new condo sales.

New home and high-rise condo sales have rebounded from last year’s dramatic slump and exceeded 10-year averages for sales in the first quarter of the year, says research firm RealNet Canada.

Low-rise home sales — which have hit record lows over the last two or three years — were up 51 per cent in the first three months of 2014 over the same period last year.

High-rise condo sales saw an even bigger uptick, coming in 68 per cent above the same quarter of 2013, when the industry was in a significant downturn.

The sale of 4,962 condos in the first three months of 2014 far exceeded the quarter’s 10-year average, 3,675. In fact, it wasn’t far behind the record 5,372 condos sold in Q1 of 2011, which would go on to become the peak year for condo sales across the GTA.

Last month was the best March ever for high-rise condo sales, with transactions up 105 per cent (to a total of 2,496 units) over the same month last year, and up 42 per cent over the 10-year average, said RealNet president George Carras in releasing the statistics Wednesday.

The index price of a highrise condo was up one per cent in the first quarter, to $436,989, said RealNet. The index price of a new low-rise home in the GTA was up three per cent in the quarter, to $657,961.

That means the gap between the index price of a condo and a house has now grown by another seven per cent, to $221,063.

The inventory of unsold units continues to grow — it’s now at 30,898, with more than 22,000 of those high-rise condos rather than low-rise homes, said RealNet. And most of those unsold condo suites have yet to even be built.

New unit sizes continue to shrink — they now average less than 800 square feet across the GTA — as developers try to keep costs down in the face of higher development fees and other costs.

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